Deep Thought of the Day: Time

Anyone who has taken more than a few minutes in life to earnestly contemplate the concept of Time, has probably arrived at the truthful conclusion that it does not exist. Time is a concept, manufactured by man, so that we can organize our thoughts around the incomprehensible eternity that exists about us. This order allows us to operated in a constructive fashion. The absence of the concept of Time would be like the absence of language. If you can not communicate your desires, you are left with the only option to act out every little thing that crosses your mind. Language affords us the luxury of patient consideration and input from without before acting out recklessly when our intent may be the opposite. We have instituted the concept of Time to keep track of our place in the grand scheme of things, as well as to recognize the place of everything else.

There is no physical/objective thing or energy that can be identified as Time. The concept of numbers is the same as Time or language. Numbers are manufactured concepts that we use to understand things. People have always posed the question, "can we travel through time"? I'd like to ask the question, can we travel through language or numbers? After all, they're the same thing. It's a ridiculous proposition. What we do know is that light captures the images of everything it touches and from what we know, those images exist forever. It is how we are able to see a distant star go super nova in today's night sky, though the star actually exploded millions of years ago. It took the light, holding that image, millions of years to reach earth thus we are literally looking into the past. If the image can be held in the light for millions of years, there's no reason to believe that it doesn't last forever. In spite of the magical seeming looking glass of light, this still isn't confirmation of the existence of Time; it is more a statement about the nature and properties of light & distance.

Even if we were to accept the notion the light is Time itself, we would also have to accept the reality that we can only view it (not participate) and only view the past as the only images trapped by the light are the images of events that have already come to pass. The most fundamental use of Time is as a measure of movement. We measure the motion of the planets about one another to calculate years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. In other words, Time is just a man-made ruler and system of measurement. The properties of light are far more interesting but we convolute the truth and study of the subject by falsely attributing the concept of Time to it. While the system of Time can be used to measure the movement of the light, it should not be confused as being the light itself. It would be an interesting venture to catch up to the light that has passed the Earth. Somewhere far passed the Earth, the events of the Earth's entire history are being fed into the skies of a distant world. If we could catch up to that light that has passed us, we could perhaps view our own history, as it actually happened. Perhaps we could even develop a technology that allows us to sort through the images and isolate specific events and places at specific points in history. It's all very intriguing. Anywho, that's my Deep Thought of the day.